Tuesday, 5 June 2012

5 reasons why Prometheus is At The Mountains of Madness in space SPOILERS

A number of months ago, Guillermo del Toro announced that he may not be taking H.P. Lovecraft's opus At the Mountains of Madness to the big scree after all, citing Ridley Scott's latest effort as the reason. According to del Toro, Prometheus is essentially the same story and that would pretty much take away from an ATMOM movie.

Just like Lovecraft's epic, Prometheus tells the story of a team of scientists who travel to a distant, inhospitable location after evidence of an ancient civilisation is hinted at. Both tales deal with the slow unravelling of the history of an alien civilisation, delving into parts of the world (or galaxy) that have never been visited before by humans. The protagonists aren't gun-toting beefcakes; they're studious academics who have an insatiable thirst for knowledge.

They find a dead civilisation...or so they think

Both stories have the protagonists find the dead, decapitated bodies of the ancient beings that originally lived in that location, both having been dead for many thousands of years. However, the more they explore, the more they find out that this civilisation may not be as dead as it seems.

Both aliens created human life

In Prometheus, the protagonist is dead set on finding evidence that humans were created by a seeding race and ATMOM reveals that the Elder Things were the ones who originally created life on Earth. Both are essentially our gods, although the reasoning for the aliens (or engineers) seeding Earth isn't quite clear.

Both aliens engineered species that got out of control

In ATMOM the Elder Things created Shoggoths to serve them, acting as a slave race. However, the Shoggoths eventually became independent and rebelled against their masters, killing many. Although the Elder Things managed to subdue the Shoggoths while the engineers in Prometheus were almost all destroyed by their own alien creations which they were to use as weapons, rather than slaves.

Both stories leave us wanting more answers

In Prometheus, we're left wanting to know more about the engineers and why they chose to seed on Earth, while in ATMOM we're left wondering what exactly is beyond those mountains that the Elder Things are so afraid of. Both leave us in a state of unease - there are powerful things out there that we cannot yet explain, but it's very possible that they may one day destroy us all.